Old Updates

Here, you can read all the updates on this site since October 25th 2003 and some of the ones from September and August 2003 - the site has been around since November 2nd 2002, but unfortunately most of the updates from the first year were never archived. Be advised that some links might take you to outdated sections or something else that has been taken off the site - I do not necessarily endorse the content of any such sections.

11/29/13: More type chart tweaks

It seems I just can't stop tinkering with the Interactive Type Chart. I'm sure you're all tired of hearing about it by now and just want me to make some personality tests, but I added a bit of hovering functionality - if you hover over the name of a type either on the left side or the top, the corresponding row/column will be highlighted, and if you hover over an individual cell it will be highlighted along with the type names heading both its row and column. This should make it easier to make sure at a glance that you're looking at the correct cell. This looked smoother with the table borders collapsed, which really makes the chart look cleaner overall, so I did that as well. Finally, I also added four more dropdowns for attack types in moveset coverage mode, in case you want to examine coverage for multiple Pokémon with more than four types of attacks total.

UPDATE EDIT: Because I am a nerd, I also edited it to consistently pluralize correctly (so it will say "1 type", but "2 types").

11/17/13: Mobile-friendliness

I just made the Interactive Type Chart a bit more mobile- and otherwise small-window-friendly, or attempted to at any rate - in smaller browser windows it will now move the options to the top so the type chart itself can take up all the available horizontal space, and on even smaller devices the font size will become smaller on the chart itself so it can better fit within the window. Feedback from somebody who actually browses the site on a mobile device would be much appreciated - I don't have a smartphone or a tablet so I can't really get a decent idea for myself of how this works out in practice.

11/16/13: More X/Y updates, plus new type chart mode

Additionally, I added a new mode to the Interactive Type Chart: "filtered simple mode", which shows a chart of type effectiveness for combos with some given type. This offers a better way than before to get an overview of all of a particular Pokémon's weaknesses, resistances and immunities: switch to filtered simple mode, filter by its first type, then look down its second type's column. It also lets you easily look for, say, Fairy combinations that resist or are immune to Steel.

11/02/13: Eleven Years

Happy birthday, dear site,Let's celebrate tonight.Eleven years since you got here- and the future looks bright.

The Cave of Dragonflies is eleven years old today. Whoohoo! I'm afraid I don't have a proper update, because I only just updated a couple of days ago and haven't finished anything of note since (see the Old Updates). But I'm still working on more X/Y updates. I'm prioritizing getting existing content up-to-date before making new stuff, so unfortunately the Zodiac will have to wait a bit, but I will get to that too.

10/31/13: More X/Y stuff

I've updated the list generator, fun facts and Gotta Spell 'Em All in accordance with the sixth generation. Yes, I know they're missing the leaked event legendaries; I don't plan to put those on there until they're officially revealed or have become so widely hacked that there's no point trying to keep them secret anymore. In the process, I basically recoded the list generator, and while it's mostly the same, it's now somewhat more flexible, allowing you to (for instance) create an alphabetically-ordered list that shows every Pokémon's number in some regional Pokédex (or, for that matter, every regional Pokédex).

The Interactive Type Chart has also had the sixth generation's existing type combinations added to it, as well as making the sixth-generation chart the default, and the new default "Symmetrical" option for ignoring nonexistent combinations, which will only ignore a combination if neither it nor its inverse exists.

10/16/13: Sixth-generation evolutions

I've added the known sixth-generation Pokémon to the evolution list. Note that at the moment most of the information is just taken from Serebii with possible clarification by some friends, so I can't vouch for its accuracy beyond that, but I was starting to really want a quick reference for myself so I might as well share.

10/12/13: Pokémon Origins review

Hope you're all enjoying your X and Y (I don't have them yet, but am going to England in a few hours and hope to buy a 3DS and probably both games there). Sadly there is no personality test yet, but instead I went with one of the other popular options from the poll and reviewed Pokémon Origins, the first-generation-themed special that aired in Japan recently. (Okay, so it's not quite a movie, but shush.) Spoilers and unpopular opinions ahoy!

09/15/13: In which I join the X/Y hype

Well, the poll results are pretty clear. Now to think harder about what kind of personality test I want to make. (I've narrowed it down to a few possibilities, but they each have their pros and cons.)

I suspect somebody very enthusiastic about getting the quiz scripts updated desperately circumvented my very casual measures against people voting multiple times to boost that option, since I several times saw that option suddenly get a huge chunk of votes conveniently bringing it just ahead of the previously second-most-popular option, but I want to do that anyway, so I'll pretend this is totally legit.

In the meantime, the sixth-generation type chart has been officially revealed, and I couldn't resist making it available as a base chart in the Interactive Type Chart. Since we don't know all the new Pokémon or their type combinations yet, you still can't pick the sixth generation in the "ignore nonexistent type combintions" box, but this does mean you can play around with the next-gen modifications and their effects upon the type balance in general. I also made several UI improvements to the chart while I was at it - it doesn't resize ridiculously when you enable editing existing types anymore, switching base charts or disabling editing of custom types no longer resets your moveset coverage mode attack type selections, and you no longer need to be in simple mode to switch base charts or enable/disable editing of custom types. (You do still need to be in simple mode to add a type, however, because I can't imagine a situation where you'd want to add a type without then wanting to set its damage multipliers.) Some of what I did to facilitate this was a bit hackish, so I may go make further improvements to it soon.

Also, I made a new sixth-generation-themed Almighty Random Poll, because I felt like it and also the previous one was rapidly getting out of date.

09/03/13: In which I fail epically

As I was playing around with my laptop's local copy of the site to make sure everything worked (guys I have a local copy again where I can break things without breaking them for everyone temporarily!), I decided to test the polls by voting "You suck" in the latest site poll. When my vote didn't appear, I thought it was some issue with the local setup, until I realized the Almighty Random Poll worked fine. So then I looked at the site poll better and discovered that actually the bottom three options were actually each voting for the option above them, because I'd managed to modify everything except the actual values those options submitted when I hastily added the Pokémon Conquest review option that I'd initially forgot to include. Which was shortly after I initially made the poll. A year ago.

The fact there were still zero votes for "You suck" seriously should have tipped me off at some point, but I somehow managed to not have it even occur to me that this might be a technical issue as opposed to a strange psychological one (I actually wondered several times what on earth it was about this poll that everyone was so opinionated about that nobody wasted their vote on "You suck"). That'll teach me to thoroughly test things if I ever mess with the poll form manually again instead of sticking with the generated one.

Since the poll was pretty outdated anyway, what with how I'd already made several of the options, I just made a new one to replace it and will then slink away in embarrassment, but let's go quickly through the options one more time first, shall we?

Later-game Safari Zone mechanics

What I already did for R/B/Y, expanded to the later generations with Safari Zones (and possibly the Bug-Catching Contests in G/S/C/HG/SS).

Weather/field effects section

Same as the previous poll - this would mostly be there for completeness with my other game mechanics sections. Not too exciting.

More movie reviews

I really want to catch up on the Pokémon movies, and writing horribly lengthy reviews in the process would only sweeten the deal.

Redo the HTML guide

Right now it's frightfully out of date and probably very confusing in various places. I started writing a new version of it a while ago, but it still has a long way to go. (Oh, by the way, a few days ago I improved how code samples are displayed throughout the site - they have a background color distinguishing them from the surrounding text in all the styles now, and they don't scroll horizontally anymore.)

Redo the writing guide

Mostly on the poll out of curiosity - the thing will be so hellishly long if I ever finish it that it probably won't be anywhere in the near future - but people still keep bringing it up to me now and again, and if people really are massively enthusiastic about it, that might encourage me to get on with it.

Redo the quiz scripts

Another option inherited from the broken poll, although as it turns out most of the votes for it were actually supposed to be for "Something else". Who is actually interested in me revamping the free quiz scripts? I may again do this anyway even if there is little interest because aaaaah my years-old horrible spaghetti code out in public, but it would be nice to know.

New personality test

I've been wanting to do this for a couple of months, as I've said before. I'm still not quite sure exactly what the test would be about, but I think it would be fun to make, and I know that currently the What Pokémon Are You? is basically by far the most popular feature on this site, so I'm guessing others would enjoy it as well.

You suck

This option works this time! I tested it! Because let's be honest, anyone who manages to make a mistake like that and not notice it for a year kind of sucks.

08/31/13: Squash those bugs

I fixed a couple of silly bugs with the new e-mailing script that were 1) making Magikarp: the Gathering unwinnable at a certain stage, and 2) making it impossible to send an error report without providing a valid e-mail address (that field was meant to be optional). I would have done this sooner, except I've been having trouble accessing the site files from my laptop lately and I'm still in the process of figuring that out.

Oh, and I got a Tumblr. Like my Twitter and LJ, it's personal and not officially connected to this site, but I may post stuff about my progress with site-related things there, with the tag #TCoD.

08/11/13: Aaand now it works

I've replaced the old e-mailing script with one that works on the new server, so error reports, etc. should work now. Thank you for your patience. I'm sorry I haven't managed to get much done recently - I was on my honeymoon for a good chunk of July and now I'm in the middle of moving while also judging a short story contest on Serebii. (And I may also be a wee bit obsessed with Breaking Bad at the moment. Cough.) On the plus side, I have a new laptop now that's about ten bajillion times better than my old one, and I may actually be able to run a local copy of the site on my own computer again for the first time in years once I actually get around to that, which could help considerably.

The Site Poll seems to indicate I should redo the quiz scripts next, which I'm fine with - I've been kind of wanting to make another personality test for a bit, too, so that should get me in the mood. I should probably finish the Safari Zone mechanics for the later generations first, though, even though they're not nearly as interesting (read: ridiculous) as R/B/Y.

07/09/13: New Server

This is the new server. Unfortunately, I was saddled with work during what was supposed to be my vacation, resulting in me not having time to get e-mailing working on it yet - so error reports, crossword solutions and so on do not work currently. I will get to fixing this as soon as I can. Please contact me manually if you find any other issues.

06/20/13: Interactive Type Chart, Finally

This has taken way, way, way too long, but here, at last, is the Interactive Type Chart. I, at least, think it's pretty neat.

I will probably mess around with the user interface and try to improve the performance later, but for now I just wanted to get the thing up now that it all seems to work as it's supposed to. Please tell me if you discover anything out of order, describing exactly what you did before things went screwy.

The next thing for the site is moving it to a different server, which is nice because the server it's on right now is pretty spectacularly old and terrible. The new server is already bought and paid for and appears to be running, but that still leaves the task of, you know, moving the tangled mass of thousands of disorganized files that make up this site over there, and getting it all to run as it's supposed to on the new shiny server software. I will update when we're running on the new server, which is going to have to be sometime before the twelfth of July because that's when they're going to shut the old server off. Before that, actually, because on the twelfth of July I'm going to be in Las Vegas on my honeymoon and hopefully I'm not going to spend that poring over servers.

Thanks to Alti for a lot of beta testing that weeded out several bugs.

05/02/13: Safari Zone Fixes

Of course I realize I slipped up with the Safari Zone mechanics only after I put it up and not in the month it took to make it. Oh, well. I'd made the script I put up yesterday on the assumption that the run check happens before the counters are decremented, but it's actually after, which means the state used for the run check is the same as on the following player turn (which, confusingly, doesn't necessarily match up with the "Wild [Pokémon] is angry/eating!" message shown just before it). With this correction to the script, bait is officially never useful at all ever, even for Magikarp and Poliwag. Joy.

I also did rewrite basically the entire mechanical explanation to be a bit clearer and more detailed about the whole process, and overall I'm a lot more satisfied with it than yesterday.

05/01/13: Safari Zone Mechanics, Finally

Right, so somehow most of my free time in April mysteriously vanished, but here is the real R/B/Y Safari Zone Mechanics section, as promised. It probably looks underwhelming for all the time it took, because I ended up cutting basically half of what I initially wrote for it and the script had all kinds of weird bugs and performance issues and so on and so on and so on, but it has a calculator you can play with and it has way too many overelaborate strategies even though they're almost always inferior to the simplest possible one, so I hope it's at least somewhat fun.

I want to basically rewrite the whole mechanical explanation part right now, but I need to be in bed three hours ago and it should be mostly understandable. Will probably make edits tomorrow. I'll likely just add the other generations' Safari mechanics to that page - they're not nearly as interesting, so they'll probably not warrant separate pages of their own - but either way, it won't hurt to put it up in this form. Especially since as it happens this is to my knowledge the first proper analysis of how the Safari Zone works in R/B/Y (there is a vague explanation on Bulbapedia, but it's both vague and actually wrong about some crucial details), while the others are pretty well understood already.

04/02/13: Just Kidding

Sadly, that R/B/Y Safari Zone mechanics section was an April Fools' Day joke from beginning to end. (Not just the capture bypass, nervousness factor and encounter bias, note. Every word of it was a lie. Bait and rocks do not work like it said, either.) If you missed it, you can see it here, and of course, it has been archived in the April Fools' joke section with its predecessors.

But fear not; the real Safari Zone mechanics section should be coming pretty soon. The big hurdle in my way was that there were holes in the only analysis of how it works in R/B/Y that I knew of, but I've already dug up the relevant routines in the assembly and patched up the big questions. I have one thing left to confirm and then I can start writing the text of the page. Whoo. And I, at least, think how it actually works is pretty interesting, even though it doesn't involve precise button presses.

03/31/13: Safari Zone mechanics at last

Because I never do anything in the order I say I'm going to, I finished the R/B/Y Safari Zone Mechanics. It's only for R/B/Y because as I was researching this I discovered a lot of quite surprising things about how the Safari Zone worked back then, and I thought it warranted a section of its own. (Seriously. The game tries to calculate how nervous you are.)

03/23/13: Yet More, Plus Humour

In addition to adding several more B2/W2 changes that had somehow managed to slip my mind, I also updated the In-Game Humour section for the first time in years after discovering an Airplane! reference in B2/W2. Since I was updating it and adding something from the fifth-generation games, I also went through all the submissions I'd gotten and added them as well (well, the ones that qualified and were sufficiently specific, at any rate). Whoo.

03/18/13: More B2/W2 Changes

03/09/13: B2/W2 Changes

B2/W2 Changes! This should not have taken so long, ugh. There is also probably obvious stuff I'm missing. Sorry for the delay; I've been sick and having job interviews and family gatherings and so on and so on and it's been maddening.

Right now I'm actually probably going to go and rewrite most of the HTML guide because I was looking at it a couple of days ago and realized with horror that it's awful, but then I can go and continue with all those other things I was going to do.

02/09/13: Minor update

I added a couple of B/W Changes that I missed, as well as making some revisions, tweaks and corrections to the Status Ailments page. Still working on all that other stuff. B2/W2 changes should be coming soon.

01/29/13: Not what you expected

So I am working on both the Safari Zone mechanics and the Interactive Type Chart and a B2/W2 Changes section, and they're all taking ages and needing a lot of work while opaltiger is busily cracking a whip over my head to make me write in all my free time... and then I happen to look at an error report I got a while ago about the Marquee of Doom stopping in Chrome for somebody just before the prize appeared every time, something I didn't manage to figure out at the time and starred for later, and naturally this means I spend hours recoding/rewriting the Marquee of Doom instead of doing any of the things anyone actually wanted me to do.

The good news is I did figure out what was wrong with it in Chrome - it seems to be a bug in the browser, where if it happened that the width of the marquee on your screen was such that at some point a word would wrap to the next line with the cursor after it but could fit on the previous line if the cursor weren't there, no more text would appear until the next explicit line break. For the person who submitted the error report, then, this happened just near the end and prevented them from getting the prize. Ouch. But I also figured out how to work around it, so it should work fine now.

While I was at it, I also adjusted the marquee so that spaces, punctuation and line breaks have a slightly longer wait after them than regular letters, giving a somewhat more natural illusion of typing (I sped up the letters, though, so it should be net faster overall for an average section of it). The script is better now, so it should (not that I've run any benchmarks) run faster on older computers. (Because I am a nerd, I did run benchmarks, and yes, it's a lot faster doing the actual typing now, though of course it still includes deliberate delays between letters so on a system where those dominate the running time of the script, obviously there won't be much of a difference.) And because I can't not do so, I rewrote the text of the marquee - it's mostly the same attempts to bore you, but with somewhat different text around them, which was also the basic gist of the last rewrite of the marquee. I'm not sure I'm that fond of this version so I may go and rewrite it some more, but I will try to actually work on the things I'm supposed to be doing instead of that.

01/01/13: Happy 2013

Happy new year, everyone. Hope you've had nice holidays; mine were hectic enough that I didn't get much done, but oh well. I'm going to finish that type chart as soon as I can.

So, to follow tradition, my New Year's Thanks!

The London Expo crew, including Dannichu, opaltiger, elyvorg, Cirrus, Espeon, Mhals and surskitty, for making it so worth it buying flights to England twice a year. You are such lovely people.

Shadey, for being the softest cuddliest.

My parents, for lunches and walks with accompanying discussions.

The QftL readers who cheered me on for NaNoWriMo, for making me actually finish the bloody thing at last. Whoo! opal gets a special mention here again for having roped me into doing it in the first place (though he has yet to show me pictoral evidence of the actual pom-poms he promised to use).

opal and elyvorg (again), for theorizing on my silly fanfic and making me feel like an evil mastermind.

Psychic, for continuing to be wonderful.

elyvorg (yet again), for being amazing, watching ReGenesis and The Prestige, showing me The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! and other delightful things. This makes up for the fact she has still not written any Lost Evolution, which makes me sadface.

magical, for looking into game mechanics with/for me.

Chibi Pika, for being my fanfiction psychic twin, drawing the most amazing things, more theorizing, and being hilarious.

I care about the truth, and I strive to keep the information on this website accurate and up-to-date. For instance, where possible, I have taken pains to personally test claims about the video games before making them. However, doing so is not always feasible, occasionally I manage to be wrong even when I think I've confirmed something, and with a website of this size, it's difficult to keep track of every single piece of information anywhere on it that might need to be changed or updated. Thus, if you spot any errors, mistakes or out-of-date tidbits - or even just typos - I'd be thrilled if you would report them via this form.